DR. DUMAS MALONE'S TALK
TO THE MONTICELLO ASSOCIATION
Made at the Keswick Hunt Club - May 2, 1976
Mr. Taylor, descendants of Thomas Jefferson, I'm very proud to be an honorary member of this association. I'm sure there is nothing like it in the United States. There are various organizations honoring public men, and there are family organizations, but I don't know of any that are related to a president. Even if there were another one, it wouldn't be as impressive as this one because, as you no doubt know, Mr. Jefferson has more descendants than any other president. George Washington had no children. John Adams had more children than Jefferson but nothing like as many grandchildren. Madison had no children. Monroe had one child. So the race was between Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Adams. They had a start on everybody else, and my understanding is that Mr. Jefferson is definitely ahead.
I'm not going to make any address; I just thought I would talk to you informally about Mr. Jefferson as a family man. And I recognize that some of you know more about that than I do -not all of you but some of you. Miss Olivia Taylor undoubtedly does and if Jim Bear is here somewhere, he has published the family letters. Incidentally, if any of you do not own a copy of the family letters of Thomas Jefferson, please hasten to get a copy. I have two copies; one for my study in the Alderman Library and one for my study at home. It's a very delightful collection. I don't need to remind you that Mr. Jefferson was very much a family man. He had many sides to his character, but there's none that is more attractive than the domestic side. Don't think that that is always true of distinguished men. Some of them are wonderful in public and dreadful at home. It would be hard to fault Mr. Jefferson's conduct as a family man.
There may have been some embarrassment living in the shadow of a giant; a sort of humbling experience. His son-in-law, Thomas Mann Randolph, was very conscious of this. And his second daughter, Maria, was. It wasn't because he was patronizing, for he wasn't at all, but because of his overwhelming personality. Thomas Mann Randolph was generally described as Jefferson's son-in-law; a recent biography of him has that as a subtitle. This subordination must have been rather hard for Randolph to take. Also, I think men of great achievement have this in common -it's about the only thing they do have in common -they're all men of extraordinary energy. They actually do more than other people. Nobody could conceivably have done what Mr. Jefferson did without being a man of unusual energy. It can be exhausting to be around that sort of person. So, in those respects, I think you might say that it was hard to live with Mr. Jefferson, but in no other that I can think of.
He was a devoted family man in every respect. Something has been said in a recent book to the effect that he didn't like his mother; the reason given was that he didn't mention her in his letters. Now, that's quite absurd. To begin with, the period when he would have been most likely to write letters to his mother was when he was in college (that's the time I wrote most letters to my mother), and we have very little from that period. Who knows what letters existed and have been destroyed? But even if they hadn't been lost, his not mentioning her in letters means nothing whatever. He didn't mention his wife in letters. Everybody knows he was devoted to his wife. It was not characteristic of him to mention the women in his family in letters. As a rule, he mentioned them only to other members of the family. And one of his characteristics was that the thing that he felt most deeply was the thing that he would not talk about.
There is a very good example of that in his correspondence with the Adamses. They lost their daughter after she had reached a mature age and had children but not old enough, really, to die. Mrs. Adams wrote Mr. Jefferson about her death in detail. He had known her as a girl in Paris. He had taken her to concerts with her brother, John Quincy, who later became president. I kept looking for the reply to that letter and finally found two or three sentences in a letter to John Adams. He said that he just didn't want to talk about it; it was just not the sort of thing there is any use in talking about. He had had an experience of the sort himself as, of course, they knew. So, that's one difficulty in the attempt to follow him; the things that meant most to him are the things that he did not talk about. He was a very private man in many respects but he was certainly devoted to his own family; I think there's no reason in the world to suppose that he wasn't fond of his mother and his father. You know, some of these modem psychologists seem to think you just have to be against somebody. I believe that as a man you are supposed to hate your father. Well, I can't remember ever hating my father at any point and I don't think it's at all necessary to do so.
We know a lot about his relations with other members of his family -for example, his own brothers and sisters. One of the best examples is that of his relations with the youngest of them, Anna Scott and his brother Randolph, who were twins. They were about a dozen years younger than he was. Anna Scott married a man by the name of Hastings Marks while Jefferson was in France. Hastings Marks has never emerged from obscurity; we simply don't know anything about him. Obviously, he was a person of no particular importance; this was not regarded as a particularly good marriage. (1 don't even know where they lived; maybe Jim Bear will tell me sometime; maybe he knows; they were very obscure.) When Jefferson was president and came home for a long stay, one of the first things he always did was send off a carriage for his sister, and she used to come and stay at Monticello while he was there. I haven't got any record that he sent for her husband. After her husband died, she came to Monticello and lived there all the time. She appears to have been a very amiable person; there was a great deal of amiability in the Jefferson family. She was very amiable but apparently had no particular strength. Martha, Jefferson's daughter, said this aunt just couldn't manage the servants at all; they would take things even when she was looking at them. I can say these things about her because, so far as I know, she had no descendants, and I'm not hurting anybody's feelings.
Very few people would have known that Thomas Jefferson had a brother if the library at the University of Virginia had not published his correspondence several years ago. It was edited by Bernard Mayo. Talking to me the other day, he said, "You know, I was reluctant to do this because of the terrible contrast between these two brothers." Randolph Jefferson had the same parents, he had similar educational opportunities, he was left practically the same amount of property as his brother, and yet, he is completely obscure while his brother was one of the most eminent men in history. This demonstrates how unequal the distribution of gifts by Mother Nature really is. I think he was a very amiable man; you would have liked him. He just never amounted to anything much. And his brother was doing things for him all the time, not in a patronizing way at all- just being helpful. He said that his brother consulted him about everything of importance except one; he didn't consult him about his second marriage. He implied that that was a mistake. So there you have a marvelous example of kindness and love and devotion within the family.
It's very interesting to note how these people addressed each other. I don't know what they said when they met each other, but in letters, Thomas Jefferson would always address Randolph as "Dear Brother." And Randolph Jefferson writing back didn't say "Dear Thomas" or "Dear Tom" (in fact, nobody ever said that), but "Dear Brother." They signed themselves "Affectionately, Th: Jefferson" and "Rh: Jefferson."
Their sister Martha married Dabney Carr , who was the first person buried in the graveyard. She died many years later while Thomas Jefferson was president. Reporting her death to his brother Randolph, he spoke of her as "our worthy Sister Carr ." He didn't say our Sister Martha; he said our Sister Carr . And the children didn't say Aunt Anna or Aunt Martha; they said Aunt Marks or Aunt Carr.
I have often wondered what Jefferson called his sons-in-law. He addressed them in letters "Dear Sir ." But he had known them both when they were quite young, and it's rather surprising that whenever he was writing to his daughters about their husbands, he always said Mr. Randolph or Mr. Eppes; when writing him, they did the same.
But when he was talking to his two sons-in-law, Thomas Mann Randolph and John W. Eppes, what did he call them? It would be very interesting to find out. Some of these things about daily life are the things that we know the least about because these are things nobody bothers to mention. Mr. Jefferson's relations with his sons-in-law were extremely good, generous in extreme. I think he may have been almost too generous. Thomas Mann Randolph was a moody person, as you probably know; he was afraid that Jefferson liked Jack Eppes better than he did him when actually Mr. Jefferson looked upon both of them as sons.
We have plentiful information about his relations with his daughters. Martha, who lived much longer than her sister, was closer to her father than any person on earth. She looked very much like him and was very much like him in temperament. She had the same cheerful disposition. You may remember that one of her daughters said she had the sunshine of heaven in her nature. She may have had more humor than her father -I think she did -and she was undoubtedly a very wonderful woman. Her younger sister Maria, you know, died a lot earlier. I have always been enormously interested in her relations with her father. She had an inferiority complex. She is supposed to have been the better looking of the two daughters but less intellectual than her sister. Almost the first thing I ever wrote on Mr. Jefferson was about her -a little piece entitled, "Polly Jefferson and Her Father," which I wrote about forty years ago, Hers is a very sad and very tragic story.
In his relations with his daughters, Mr. Jefferson was very much given to moralizing. If you go back and read the letters he wrote them before they were married, you can see how much advice he gives them. "You must study hard and be a good girl," he said, "and if you work hard enough, you can accomplish a great deal," and so on, and so on, and so on. I wonder if the modern generation of children would have taken it. I, myself, don't find it so hard to understand because it seems to me that when I was in college, I hardly ever got a letter from my mother that didn't have some moralizing in it and advice for me to do something; I can't seem to remember that it bothered me very much. After the girls grew up, after they got married, he stopped moralizing except in the early stages of Maria's marriage. He gave her a great deal of advice about marriage then.
We come finally to the grandchildren. I'm in the grandchildren's stage right now and enjoying it enormously. He is not moralizing anything like as much and he is not telling them as much what to do; he is enjoying the wonderful status of a grandparent, which I assure you is one of the nicest on earth since you have the pleasures without the responsibilities. His letters to his grandchildren are to be found in Mr. Bear's collection, and they are charming indeed. There's a certain playfulness in them that is not in the early letters to Martha and Maria.
The eldest granddaughter -Anne Cary who married Charles Bankhead - is said to have been the prettiest of the girls and she had the saddest life. She died before her grandfather did. No very long after her first child was born, a son, they were visiting her husband's parents down in Caroline County and so there was some occasion for her to have correspondence with her grandfather . Incidentally, he called all the grandchildren by their first names. They called him dear grandpapa; sometimes they would say grandfather but, as a rule, grandpapa.
He wrote one letter to Anne which I think is perhaps the loveliest I have ever seen of his. She was the member of the family who most nearly shared his love of flowers; when he was away, she took care of them. After she got married, her next sister in line, Ellen, succeeded her. Anyway, in this letter he is telling her about what has happened since she went away. The trees were unchanged, the tulips were gone, the irises were going, and the roses were coming on. That's the way it is he said. That's life. And the belles of today have to give way to the belles of tomorrow as her mother gave way to her and as she will have to give way to her daughters, though not until after he, himself, has gone away.
Next in line among the girls was Ellen Wayles. She married Joseph Coolidge, Jr. I'm sure a number of you are descended from her. Mr. Jefferson didn't play any favorites with his grandchildren, but he naturally wrote to ones that got to the age of correspondence. Ellen was a particularly articulate one of them; perhaps the most articulate of them all. In this period that I'm working on right now, she is the belle of the family because she has reached that age. I've just been going through an account of the visits she made; they visited quite a lot. They always seemed to have a lot of dressmaking to attend to, and a lot of dressmaking went on in Richmond. She went on to Washington and stayed with the President and Mrs. Madison in the White House and had quite a ball. She met many friends, and children of friends, of her grandfather. Among these were young people from Philadelphia who wanted her to go to that place, and she didn't know quite whether to go or not. About that time she got a letter from he grandfather in which he said he had just sold his tobacco and therefore was sending her $100 so she could enjoy herself. So she decided to go to Philadelphia. She wrote back to her mother that she didn't know whether she really ought to have done this, it was very extravagant, and the finances of her father were even more strained than those of her grandfather. She didn't know what her father would think, but she said she knew what her grandfather would think -he would be for it.
Jefferson thought that the family tie was the most wonderful thing in the world. To him marriage was indissoluble, and in some of the letters he wrote Maria soon after she was married, he was reminding her that this was not always going to be easy. She was going to have plenty of difficulties and a lot of patience and tolerance would be required, but he thought that, above all things, family ties must be preserved. You know he kept saying throughout his life that he didn't like public life; he said he wanted to get back to his family and his farm and his books. There has been a tendency on the part of historians to say that he couldn't really have meant it, that he was bound to have been burning with political ambition. Of course, he had some, but he wasn't burning with it. And think he was absolutely right; that's what he really felt. In one of his letters to Maria, a year or so before her death, he said that it is only in the love of one' family that heartfelt happiness can be known. Of course, that isn't the only place but he had no doubt that it was the best one. And if he were here now to greet his descendants, I'm sure that is exactly what he would say.